Technology

This map shows readings from about 770,000 home sensors, with red zones indicating areas with the most distorted power.

Bloomberg News analyzed data from about 770,000 Ting sensors from Whisker Labs, which are plugged into homes across the country, to better understand the distribution and severity of an important power-quality measure known as total harmonic distortion (THD). A lower THD is better.

Good large source of data, but possibly misleading about the severity of the problem (as well as the source being somewhat dubious as it's from a private company).

I'm from Washington and was actually surprised at how small the problem is in the Seattle area and surrounding compared to the rest of the country. We have explosive data center growth here that seems ill represented by this map.

Further, a lot of the massive data centers in Washington are actually on the Eastern side of the state, particularly in Wenatchee, which on this map is just basically entirely black. The small line of spots on the East side of the state seems more in line with Yakima/Tri-Cities/Spokane while not really including the more rural Wenatchee/Chelan area. I wish you could zoom in more on this map so I could do a proper overlay to see what areas are being missed.

Is that because it's mostly rural and not a lot of the rural residents have the money to be adding home-sensors to be testing their energy and whether its "clean?" Like seriously, that seems more like a wealthy-people service, I had never heard of Whisker Labs or Ting before now. So not only is the data going to be limited to bigger cities (so like so many maps its really just a fucking population map), but it's going to miss every area that isn't as wealthy.

So Wenatchee is sparsely populated, shows up as basically black on the map, but is also home to some of the largest bitcoin mining datacenters in the state, if not the largest. Part of the reason they set up there is the cheap electricity due to close proximity to hydroelectric power. Because the population is small, more rural, and generally poorer, there's fewer sensors showing higher THD in the area.

So anyway, a lot of words to say that this problem may be even more serious than this map shows, because there's a lot that this map isn't showing including the explosion of data centers in more rural areas with cheap electricity, where there not be as many rich folks with Ting sensors.